Katy Dickinson

Why read a book?

Last month while camping in the Sierras, I saw a woman reading a book using a Kindle (Amazon's Wireless Reading Device). It looked interesting (portable, convenient, easy to use) but I wasn't tempted. Why not? I have always been addicted to books but more particularly, to books in the form of a codex.

I recently finished reading The Archimedes Codex (by Reviel Netz and William Noel, Da Capo Press, 2007, ISBN-10: 030681580X, ISBN-13: 978-0306815805) which presents the many "technology upgrades" that the works of Archimedes survived between about 212 BC (when the great mathematician and scientist was killed by a Roman soldier in Syracuse, Sicily) and now. The Archimedes Codex is the story of how three of Archimedes' works started out in scroll form and ended up as a medieval codex in very poor condition sold at public auction in 1998 as the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since 1998, Archimedes' works have gone through their most recent IT upgrade and next month (at 2 pm on October 29th, 2008 to be precise), a digital version of the Archimedes Palimpsest is scheduled to be released on the web.

Will Noel (of Baltimore's Walters Art Museum) writes in The Archimedes Codex:

"Nothing is more dangerous for the contents of old documents than an information-technology upgrade, because mass data transfer has to take place and somebody has to do it. The transition from the roll to the codex - the book format we know today - was a revolution in the history of data storage." (pp.70-71)
"As the ancient world disappeared, its gods went with it. And as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, many classical texts, if they were not condemned as dangerous, were dismissed as irrelevant. It is not that Christians willfully destroyed them very often; they just ceased to copy them." (p.74)

I think we live in a time when books are changing form, just as they did in the 1st through 4th century AD when the codex took over from the scroll. Which books will survive the transition from codex to Kindle? My daughter is working on the P4 project at Carnegie Mellon's Posner Collection to record more of Shakespeare and Twain for YouTube. I am enjoying watching this project develop.

The best list of reasons I have found to prefer reading a book in codex form to reading the same text on a computer is in Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea (Perigee Trade, 2008) ISBN-10: 0399533982, ISBN-13: 978-0399533983. This book is full of obscure but delightful words from the OED like "Nod-crafty (adj.) 'Given to nodding the head with an air of great wisdom.'" and "Peristeronic (adj.) 'Suggestive of pigeons.'" In Chapter F, Ammon Shea writes of his admiration for all of the amazing new ways to search and understand that are now available because of the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Shea then describes why he still prefers the codex. Here are some of his reasons:

What Can't You Do With an Electronic Book?

• Drop it on the floor in a fit of pique, or slam it shut.
• Leave a bookmark with a note on it, then happily find it years later.
• Get tactile pleasure from rubbing the pages.
• Have a sense of time and investment because of pages read. On a computer "...everything is always in the same exact spot. When reading a book, no matter how large or small it is, a tension builds, concurrent with your progress through its pages."
• Sit down prior to using it, open it up and sniff its pages.
• Have "...that delicious anticipatory sense that I am about to be utterly and rhapsodically transported by the words within it."

I would add to Shea's list the physical delight in the art of book making. A computer offers nothing like the feel of the embossed image of a book cover under my finger tips. Shea ends with:

"But what does the computer know of the comforting weight of a book in one's lap? Or of the excitement that comes from finding a set of books, dusty and tucked away in the back corner of some store? The computer can only reproduce the information in a book, and never the joyful experience of reading it." (p.58)

Posted at 05:51PM Sep 23, 2008 by katysblog in News & Reviews  |  Comments[4]

QTIP and Lipstick

I saw the delightful cover of the current issue of the free Metro Silicon Valley newspaper and immediately thought of QTIP.

Metro Silicon Valley Cover

QTIP

I don't mean Unilever's brand of cotton swab but rather QTIP, the acronym for
Quit Taking It Personally.

Even someone like me who does not watch TV has heard of the embarrassing squabble two weeks ago between our presidential candidates over the phrase Lipstick on a pig and who was calling whom a pig. The Metro cover image of three piggies with crowns dancing around the big lipstick captured the silliness of the debate beautifully. If I could say one thing to Obama and McCain right now, it would be to ask them to set a better example for adult behavior and just QTIP.

Posted at 01:13PM Sep 23, 2008 by katysblog in News & Reviews  |